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Tango Argentino (Revisited)
This – the article reproduced above – is what I thought of tango long before I started to dance it socially and engage with its history and culture on a deeper and more personal level. I have wanted to track down this clipping, from the Boulder Daily Camera, without knowing where it was that I…
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4:44 • Melancholia
The last day on earth, if it were known in advance and calculated to the minute, would surely be the greatest case of a watched pot never boiling in history, until, of course, it did. With 4:44: THE LAST DAY ON EARTH, Abel Ferrara perfectly captures the strange combination of ennui, anxiety, wonder, fear, panic, and…
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William Barnacle Tavern
You are looking at absinthe just louched at the William Barnacle Tavern in the East Village, an eccentric establishment if ever there was one, owned and run by a descendant of Restoration playwright Thomas Otway and attached to Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. The place was a Prohibition era speakeasy that was actually wired…
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Silent House
The advance notices have been a bit unfair to Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s SILENT HOUSE. They have made it impossible to experience the film’s aesthetic structure – it was ostensibly shot in real time and in a single take – as one might have without having had prior knowledge of the device. Rather than…
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These Seven Sicknesses
Green tea is served during the dinner and dessert breaks of the Flea Theater’s production of Sean Graney’s THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES, which telescopes the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles into a single play. The cast mingles with the audience during the intervals – the gentleman at the serving cart plays the warrior Ajax a few…
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Prima Donna
Pictured is the lobby ceiling at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the new home for the New York City Opera: I post this great full sail of an image on the occasion of having seen and enjoyed PRIMA DONNA, a modern opera by songwriter and folk music scion Rufus Wainwright. As usual, part of the…
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Hugo
Judging by HUGO, 3D has come a long way since The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which, if you see it in revival, is a fun glimpse of ’50s pop history, but as cinema, well… Counterintuitively, 3D doesn’t make a two-dimensional movie seem more like the three-dimensional universe. On the contrary, it creates a certain…
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Shame
In the most memorable scene in Steve McQueen‘s SHAME, Carey Mulligan sings a version of “New York, New York” stripped of romanticism and false promise, utterly resigned to the fact that she will probably not make it, here or anywhere. The close-up on her is punctuated by two or three perfectly positioned cutaways to the…
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Crazy Horse
Frederick Wiseman‘s documentary about a Parisian erotic dance club, which I went to upon hearing of its profound sociological content from the New York Times, is every bit as engrossing as promised. I did not need to be sold on its central premise, that nude, or partially nude, dancing can be seriously artistic. That has…
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Coriolanus
My suspicion is that a lot of people would find this film version of Shakespeare’s CORIOLANUS to be tough going, and for a good ways into it, I was one of them. The early images struck me as heavy-handedly pacifist, modernized and uncoupled from Shakespeare, who is wise on the subject of war but hardly…